New York Fashion Week’s Story on Social Media

The who, what, when and where of this much awaited, high profile event.

Who - Writers and designers shining on the social media runway

Are Twitter and magazines a female business? Articles found in magazines are in a large part written by female authors, such as Forbes contributors Ko Im and Vivienne Decker, style and beauty writers Rachel Torgerson and Rose Walano for US Weekly, or Stephanie Chan for Hollywood Reporter. Covering a hot topic in a timely manner on blogs with great authority is certainly an elegant way to rise up as a social media influencer.

Top female tweeters include Fashion director of Marie Claire Nina Garcia, country singer Carrie Underwood and The Hills star and fashion designer Lauren Conrad. They shown they know how to maintain interaction with their communities while subtly promoting their new work!

The top brands present at NYFW are Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren, and DKNY with more than 21,200 conbined online mentions over the past month

Michael Kors’ Twitter account in particular gained an extraordinary amount of new followers as the date approached NYC Fashion Week, peaking at 5,842 new followers on September 6th, 2015.

@MichaelKors Twitter follower growth over time

Kors’ Facebook page performed even better, managing to propel engagement rates to a high of over 40,000 engagements for one post (shares, likes and comments at a post level).

Michael Kors’ top Facebook posts of the week are positively received and are intensely shared, commented and liked by the community.

What - The model under the spotlight

The uniqueness of beauty: 18 year old model Madeline Stuart is catching all the attention. 13K mentions were collected on social media about her appearance in Cosmopolitan talking about her impact on the world (yay to #FashionFreeFromConfines!). For our part, we can say there was a clear impact on the world of social media: over the past 30 days, Stuart’s coverage in online news and blogs and magazines roughly amounted to 1132 articles. Not bad!

The top "emotions" identified on social media about Stuart include words like “beautiful”, “amazing”, “excited”, “positive”, or “important”. Way to go, girl!

When – models, guests, and designers get their moments of buzz at NYFW

Social media monitoring of all New York Fashion Week related publications and #NYFW hashtag tracking show us great insights about the past week’s results – we can actually identify what stood out from the noise. A closer trends analysis revealed that model with a bionic arm Rebekah Marine, Instagram’s supposed ability to predict the next runway walking model, and the arrival of some popular guests were the events that made the social media crowd go wow.

Overall, the most trending hashtags of New York Fashion Week were the official #NYFW and industry-related hashtags such as #fashion, #inspiration, or #style. The other pillars of the Big 4 Fashion Weeks also got their hashtags heavily used (#LFW, PFW and MFW for London, Paris and Milan Fashion Week respectively). One set of hashtags particularly caught our attention however, originating from Taiwanese acclaimed fashion design Malan Breton: #MaZu, #Taiwan, #MalanBreton, #SunMoonLake are all related to his inspirational for Spring/Summer Collection of 2016.

What does this show? Timely content marketing can do wonders so hop on trending stories and be part of the social media conversations to gain recognition.

Where - NYC of course, but you must be crazy not to be on Instagram at the same time

Platform-wise, more than 13,000 posts were published on Instagram in the past month, with 500 posts on average per day. A look at the three main social networks of this event shows the highest potential reach for Twitter but the best level of engagement for Instagram.

A deeper look shows us the top Instagram posts, which got up to 32,600 engagement (i.e. likes and comments). Givenchy sure knows how to rock that post interaction!

The top 6 most engaged Instagram posts about NYFW are from @givenchyofficial

So these were some insights and figures on how successful brands and media personalities can create buzz and turn the social media spotlight on their work, story, and news. A good recipe for online reputation will require consideration of the time factor, storytelling, social media influencers buying your idea, as well as the right social networks and use of hashtags. Get that all right and you steer well clear of the dreaded Auf Wiedersehen on social media! Ex-Project Runway contestants can only agree…

Albane is a member of the Talkwalker content team, as well as the person in charge of marketing operations on the French-speaking market. When she's not writing about social media, you'll either find her with her nose in a book, swinging away on the course or planning her next trip.

Follow her on Twitter for amazing tweets on social media analytics, European affairs & obscure golf references.